Growing Scandal May Hurt Bradley in Spring Election : Analysis

On Tuesday night, everything looked up for Tom Bradley. Burt Lancaster called him a hero and “a wonderful man.” He was serenaded by the USC Marching Band and raised $220,000 for his campaign to stay on as Los Angeles mayor.

By noon Wednesday, however, Bradley had a growing scandal on his hands, the kind that could reverberate until next spring’s election.

It began last week with the disclosure that Alvin Greene, Bradley’s choice as chairman of the city Housing Authority, had not attended a meeting for months. The picture worsened for the mayor when senior city officials challenged Bradley’s denial of any knowledge of Greene’s lapses.

Years before, Bradley was embarrassed by his choice of a friend, Homer Smith, to manage the city’s public housing. Now it is not only Bradley’s judgment in question, but also his forthrightness.

The scandal comes at a bad time for the mayor. Aides had been preparing for the reelection campaign confident that they were fully informed on the issues they expected to arise.

Just this week a newcomer, Chris Humes, was hired as the reelection campaign manager. Humes, a former chief aide to Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Sacramento), is a favored close confidante of Deputy Mayor Mike Gage.

The timing now is perfect for Bradley’s rival in next spring’s election.

Before the last mayoral election, City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky opted not to run after deciding that he had no issue potent enough to damage Bradley’s popularity. He ended up raising money for Bradley and told reporters, “We agree on 90% of things that come down the pike.”

Now, nearly four years later, Yaroslavsky is busy trying to persuade prospective contributors that Bradley has changed, that he is not the same larger-than-life mayor whom Yaroslavsky and most Los Angeles voters have supported since 1973.

Yaroslavsky and his supporters said they believe that the Greene brush fire, which they had a hand in stoking, can only help the case.

“Somebody was lying, and I didn’t think it was Grace Davis,” said Yaroslavsky, referring to Deputy Mayor Grace Montanez Davis, the senior aide who said last weekend that Bradley knew months ago of problems with Greene.

A political analyst in the Yaroslavsky camp, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the controversy will help them argue that Bradley has not governed the city with his full attention since being defeated twice in bids for governor. He lost the closest race ever for governor of California in 1982, then was trounced in 1986.

The incident also helps by questioning Bradley’s image of honesty and the ability to stand above the ordinary political fray, the Yaroslavsky analyst said.

Nudge From Yaroslavsky

Yaroslavsky originally helped nudge the Greene scandal to life, appearing in a taped interview on the KCBS-TV report that disclosed Greene’s absence from housing authority meetings.

A few days later, when it was clear that the TV report caused no stir, Yaroslavsky wrote a critical letter to the mayor and released it to the City Hall press corps. Reporters then began asking more questions about Greene and what Bradley knew.

Yaroslavsky’s letter also criticized the mayor for allowing slum conditions to occur in the city’s public housing projects. Yaroslavsky said he has done nothing else to fuel the controversy.

Bradley aides, meanwhile, say they are not terribly concerned about Yaroslavsky’s ability to take advantage of the Greene affair and other criticism of the housing authority. Some aides concede that the mayor was somewhat dispirited after the 1986 defeat, but they say Bradley has repaired any damage to his reputation under the aggressive leadership of Gage, his chief deputy.

For instance, aides said, in the last year the city has stopped dumping sewage sludge into Santa Monica Bay and has passed a law proposed by the mayor to tie future development to sewage capacity. Those and other steps have sharply curtailed criticism of the mayor by environmental activists.

Bradley Cites Goals

At his fund-raising dinner Tuesday in Century City, Bradley said he has met his goals to repair the deteriorating downtown, turn the harbor into a modern deep-sea port and upgrade facilities at Los Angeles International Airport.

“All that has been changed,” Bradley said. He added, “We have now begun to develop or grow or prosper.” Bradley said the growth would not come at the expense of neighborhoods whose residents believe they are overdeveloped.

The mayor will try to repel Yaroslavsky’s challenge mostly with the same advisers who have worked on earlier campaigns, but with Gage more clearly in command.

The dinner Tuesday night, which retired the last $150,000 of debt from the 1986 gubernatorial campaign and raised money for the mayoral race, was organized by Irene Tritschler, a veteran of many campaigns. Aides said that Maureen Kindel, Bradley’s former president of the powerful Board of Public Works, is a key fund-raiser and that Richard Maullin, a former state energy commission chief, has been signed to conduct polling.

The choice of Humes as campaign manager is a change from Bradley’s last two campaigns, which were run by Tom Quinn, the head of the state Air Resources Board under former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. Humes worked in Sacramento as the chief aide to Gage, Bradley’s highest-ranking staff member, when Gage was a member of the state Assembly in the 1970s.